Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Bike Sex


news item:

Man who had sex with bike in court

A man has been placed on the sex offenders’ register after being caught trying to have sex with a bicycle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/26/nsex126.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

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I guess they would charge him as a Pedal-phile.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Technology creates another neologism

from World Wide Words:
 
The British breakfast TV programme GMTV reported last week that "A new poll of 2,000 adults reveals that 235 million flirtatious text messages are sent every month, at a cost of £231 million. In other words, we are spending nearly £3 billion a year 'flexting'."
 
 
 

 
 

 

Friday, October 26, 2007

"Follow the Money..."




http://www.andyfoulds.co.uk/amusement/bushv2.htm


 


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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Vista Sucks

worth watching:
 
Microsoft Vista: Where are we now?
 

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Science chief urges badger cull


 BBC News:
 
The UK government's chief scientist has advised ministers that badgers should be killed to prevent the spread of TB among cattle.
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7056501.stm
 
=====
 
I hope he said, "BADGERS? We don't neeeeed no steenking BADGERS!"

 



Climb to the top of the charts!  Play Star Shuffle:  the word scramble challenge with star power. Play Now!

Aldrich catalog doesn't have this starting material...



 
The 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4, at the 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
 
The Award for CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
 




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Macintosh Easter Eggs



In Mac OS X operating systems, a recording of the Liberty Bell march,
famous for being the opening theme of the British comedy sketch series
Monty Python's Flying Circus can be found under
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/test/.
 
 
In Mac OS X version 10.4, the recording (audiotest.au) plays 'Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!'


 
Bendesky Family Vacations:
I'm not exactly Johnny Quest, flying around the world,
encountering strange tribal cultures and giant robot spiders,
but I've been to some interesting places.
Take a gander. 


 


Climb to the top of the charts!  Play Star Shuffle:  the word scramble challenge with star power. Play Now!

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Should I get Broadband Internet? My Odyssey begins.


Broadband beckons me; mesmerising music.
I am lashed to the mast of dialup,
yet the Siren Song of Hi-Speed Internet sweetly sings.


"Untie me!" I cry, but my wallet does not hear my plea.
Unbound, I would swim to her shore,

risking the rocks of financial distress.

How long can the restraints hold me?
Even as I struggle, they now slacken...

The picture posted 'round the world

Using Photoshop, I created a South Park joke, and put it on my webpage.

View the original at http://users.rcn.com/bendesky/about/south-park-spoof.jpg

I Googled for the image name, and discovered that someone in Ukraine had picked it up and posted it on a Ukrainian website.

And they translated it, too.
see http://game.matrix.odessa.ua/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=10750&d=1153062424

repeat performance

This article appeared in The Local (Sweden's news in English):

"Young Swedish women kill themselves more often"

http://www.thelocal.se/8687/20071004/

=====

Who says you only go around once in life?








Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now!

10 dumbest resume blunders


10 dumbest resume blunders
Abridged: Fortune

 

Job site CareerBuilder.com recently asked pollsters Harris Interactive to survey hiring managers and find out the wackiest resume items they've seen lately. Out of 2,627 responses, here are the top ten resume blunders made by job candidates:

  1. Attached a letter from her mother.
  2. Used pale blue paper with teddy bears printed around the border.
  3. Explained a three-month gap in employment by saying that he was getting over the death of his cat.
  4. Specified that his availability to work Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays is limited because the weekends are "drinking time."
  5. Included a picture of herself in a cheerleading uniform.
  6. Drew a picture of a car on the outside of the envelope and said the car would be a gift to the hiring manager.
  7. Listed hobbies that included sitting on a levee at night watching alligators.
  8. Mentioned the fact that her sister had once won a strawberry-eating contest.
  9. Stated that he works well in the nude.
  10. Explained an arrest record by stating, "We stole a pig, but it was a really small pig."

Bendesky family website: http://users.rcn.com/bendesky
Lots of information about my family.
Only interesting if you know me.
And even then, maybe not.


 


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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Chimps exaggerate calls for help

 
Chimpanzees under attack exaggerate their screams to get help from higher ranking group members
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7045092.stm

=====
 
"Nine One One, what is your emergency?"
 
"Hoo Hoo Hoo!"
 
"Please repeat that?"
 
"HOO HOO HOOOOO!"

 
Bendesky family website: http://users.rcn.com/bendesky
Lots of information about my family.
Only interesting if you know me.
And even then, maybe not.


 


Climb to the top of the charts!  Play Star Shuffle:  the word scramble challenge with star power. Play Now!

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Ann Coulter on "Perfection"

from a friend of mine:

Have you been perfected yet?  Me neither.  And if this is what it's like, I don't want to be.
 
 
 
 
--Michael



Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now!

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

A Fair(y) Use Tale

For a really neat piece on Copyright and Fair Use (and a bit of Disney bashing at the same time)

What if Microsoft made an iPhone ?


Science Marches On !

from a friend:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1005/2

It's a good start, but I think more study is needed.
Much more study...


Imagine a grant request which specifies ten thousand dollars... in ones.

Sweet buttered irony

 
 
Senator Larry Craig's "Super Tuber" recipe
from "Congress Cooks" internet recipe website
 
http://www.virtualcities.com/ons/id/gov/idgvlc10.htm
 
[Fill in your own "hot dog into tunnel" joke HERE]


 
Bendesky family website: http://users.rcn.com/bendesky
Lots of information about my family.
Only interesting if you know me.
And even then, maybe not.
 


 


Help yourself to FREE treats served up daily at the Messenger Café. Stop by today!

Friday, October 05, 2007

Silent 3 gets quoted by Slate.com


Slate.com has a feature they call "Today's blogs: The latest chatter in cyberspace"

The author of the article reports the comments that bloggers have made on the news stories of the day.

Somehow, Slate.com's Sonya Smith picked up my blog comment on 'Larry Craig and the Famous Toilet Stall'

Read it here (at the bottom of the page):
http://slate.com/id/2174154/

Better than bullseyeing womp rats in Beggar's Canyon

Rocket powered 21 foot long X-Wing model

powered by 4 solid fuel rockets, with moveable radio-controlled wings
...and it even has an R2D2 unit built in.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/star-wars/rocket+powered-21+foot-long-x+wing-model-actually-flies-305976.php

Launch scheduled for 10-Oct

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded.

Here's a few of the winners (?)

MEDICINE:
Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."

REFERENCE: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.

=====

LINGUISTICS:
Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

REFERENCE: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.

=====

PEACE:
The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.


complete list of Ig Noble winners and their research (dating back to 1992):
http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2007

There are some real gems in there, like the CHEMISTRY award for George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record time for igniting a barbeque grill in three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Oct. 4, 1957: Russia Puts Man-Made Moon in Orbit!

Above: Monument to Sputnik


"Beep beep beep beep beep.."
- Sputnik I

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

: Revolutionary War Germantown Festival - October 6, 2007

a line of soldiers with muskets

what it looks like when they all fire


Revolutionary War Germantown Festival - Saturday, October 6, 2007

Experience this important event in American history firsthand, as the Battle of Germantown unfolds on the grounds of Cliveden on Saturday, October 6, 2007.

Battle of Germantown Reenactments will take place at 12 Noon and 3 PM.

Event schedules, maps, and other information at:
http://www.revolutionarygermantown.org/web/battle.htm

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

: Comet's Tail Ripped Off

On April 20, 2007, Comet Encke had just dipped inside the orbit of Mercury, perilously close to the sun, when a solar eruption struck and literally tore the comet's tail off.

This surely has happened to comets before, but for the first time in history a spacecraft was watching. NASA's STEREO-A probe recorded a fantastic movie of the collision


http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/01oct_encke.htm


=====

Probably an evolutionary adaptation.
If a predator, like a Cosmic Space Dragon, grabbed the comet by the tail, the comet could safely escape.

John McCain on Christian Presidents




"I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith," McCain said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071001/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_religion

=====

I think McCain should have been pressed for a little more specific information.

Many Christians would probably agree with his statement, but they might have a different view if he said he would prefer an Episcopalian (I think that is his denomination)

Non-Episcopalian Christians might then understand how non-Christians feel about his remark.

Probably Not Safe For Work

A slide-show history of the vibrator

http://www.slate.com/id/2174905/



Monday, October 01, 2007

How to hire a Geek